Redemption Duet (Aces High MC - Cedar Falls Book 0) Read online

  “Poppy,” he started, in a calmer voice.

  “Your last words to me were to remember that you had never stopped loving me, but you did stop. You stopped before you spoke them, and you made it clear you had stopped with what you did during our time apart. You weren’t showing me you still loved me over the past couple months. You were sleeping with other women. You weren’t doing whatever it took to come home, because you were too busy utilizing your bed in the clubhouse. You didn’t call, send messages, send letters, or come to me. You didn’t check on me, not once to make sure I was okay.”

  “Snake kept me updated.”

  I laughed.

  “Snake kept you updated? Snake wasn’t trying to save our marriage. Hell, he acted more like a husband trying to make sure I was okay than you. He checked on me, made sure I was eating when I wasn’t. He made sure I was sleeping, when I wasn’t. He made sure I had ice cream stocked so that at least I could eat something while drowning in my own misery. That man – your friend – could have won me back with his behavior. Had you done any of those things yourself, you could have won me back. Instead, you continued to be a selfish bastard after me kicking you out for being a selfish bastard. You expected that being selfish and not giving a shit what was happening with me would win you my favor? You expected that I’d ever step foot in that clubhouse again knowing that you fucked every goddamn skank that walked through those doors? Just the thought that you would put me in a position to have to potentially run into one of the whores you were screwing while we were still married shows how little you cared. Did you really expect me to be sitting here waiting with breath held for you to come charging through the door once you got it all out of your system, even as you embarrassed and disrespected me?” I asked, legitimately wanting to know.

  He said nothing, just hung his head in front of me. “You put all your effort into breaking everything further. I told you when we first got together that I would never be able to live with a man who could be with another woman while he was with me. I reiterated that message when we went through it with Tanya the first time. Separated and taking time to sort ourselves out didn’t mean you had a free pass to easy pussy while I was sitting here devastated that the love of my life couldn’t even pick up a fucking phone to see if I was okay. Hell, I couldn’t even have managed to look at another man if he was throwing himself at me, let alone sleep with one, because my heart was too broken to breathe some days let alone hit that level of activity.”

  “Poppy, shit,” he started then lifted his head so I could see the tears that were running freely down his face. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me lately.”

  “Well, that makes two of us,” I informed him as I stood and moved to go across the room and collect the tape he’d thrown there. I ran my fingers across the hole he’d managed to put in the wall where it hit, and I just felt the whole situation draining me further. Something else I’d have to fix before I left.

  “I’ll patch it up for you so you don’t have to worry about anything else, Pop,” Snake offered from across the room.

  “Fuck man, I’m standing right here,” Walker spat out at him.

  “Not blind, brother. Also know you’re the one that caused the damage. I’m just trying to patch it up so it’ll stop bleeding out all over the place. Been trying to do that all this time, but you wouldn’t pull your head out of your ass and listen to any-fuckin’-body.” Snake shook his head. “A year ago we had a talk, and I told you then that this outcome was your future if you didn’t put that pride of yours aside and realize what you had in front of you instead of dwelling on the obstacles.

  “You didn’t listen then. Six months ago, I pointed out shit was sliding further, bleeding more, and that your woman never smiled anymore. You didn’t fuckin’ listen. Told you a month ago your woman lost weight, wasn’t eating, and barely hanging on, and instead of coming to her you got pissed that was ‘in your shit again’ and took one of the club bitches to your bed.” I winced at that, because hearing Snake say it made it so much worse, especially knowing he did that on the heels of hearing how poorly I was dealing with things.

  “The guys – the ones without women – have been envious of you for years. You got the best of them right there.” Snake pointed at me. “That woman is gold, and we didn’t have as much history as we do I’d be all over picking up the ball you dropped, brother. She deserved a fuck of a lot more than you gave her. And make no mistake, because I won’t allow you to think differently, I watched as she tried, repeatedly, to bring you back to yourself over the past couple years. After things went bad I watched, as you did nothing but make it worse. I can’t watch that shit anymore. It’s not right. It sure as fuck ain’t fair to her. You are my brother, but I’m fuckin’ human and I won’t stand by and watch her bleeding out for nothing any longer. Enough is enough, man.” Snake turned to me then. “Poppy, you need help with what you got going on here, you have my hands at the ready, includes patching that shit for you so you don’t have another thing to worry over.”

  “Thank you,” I told him honestly, and sort of wished I hadn’t heard him tell my husband that he’d go for me if there weren’t so much history. There was a time I would have went for Snake too, but that time was about five minutes before I’d met Walker, and I wasn’t one to look back and ruminate on what could have been. That way lays madness.

  “This is your family’s place,” Walker finally said, looking around at all the boxes. “What are you doing?”

  “Walker, I’m leaving. I can’t stay here, because all the memories are ghosts that are haunting me instead of comforting me like they once did. We’ve had two bad storms since…” I didn’t bother saying since the night we split. “We’ve had two bad storms and it almost killed me to go through them here alone in this house.”

  His face scrunched up with emotion as tears once again fell down his cheeks. He stared at me through them and then glanced around again. “I did this,” he muttered on broken words. I didn’t confirm or deny that sentiment. It was, for the most part, true. He had done this. “I broke the place you loved. I took that along with everything else, and all because I couldn’t get over the fact that I was the broken one and not you.” Well, that was a slap in the face. At my reaction Walker held out a hand to calm me. “No, you don’t understand. If it had been you, I would have been okay with not having kids, or doing whatever we had to. When they told me it was me, I felt like I’d failed you. I failed us. My body is broken, and can’t give you what you wanted. What we wanted. I couldn’t handle being the one… not being man enough…”

  “You’re a fucking idiot then!” I yelled, finally, for the first time in months. “You’re not broken. You’re sperm count was lower than normal is all. If you had listened to the doctors and done one fucking thing they suggested we could have had a baby by now.” I started ticking the things off on my fingers. “Wear loose fitting underwear,” ticked off with my forefinger. “Stay out of hot tubs and the like,” I ticked off with my middle finger. “No climaxing the week before I ovulated,” I ticked off with my now empty ring finger, and that’s when all hell broke loose.

  “Where are your rings?” He shouted.

  “This is not about my rings. This is about how your stupidity broke our marriage. You broke us because you couldn’t handle being told you needed to work harder at something.” I huffed out. “Unbelievable.”

  “Where the fuck are your rings?” He demanded on a shout again.

  I ignored his shout and stomped into the kitchen and pointed to the note I had written that was stuffed into an envelope on the counter along with the boxes that held my engagement and wedding bands. “There,” I yelled as I pointed. “I was going to have Snake drop them off to you since I didn’t want to stop by the clubhouse and chance seeing you with one of the whores who were more important to be with than your own fucking wife!” I screamed at him.

  “I think maybe you should be going, man, before this turns ugly.” Snake stated calmly to my husband
.

  “Where are you going?” Walker asked me instead.

  “That’s not your business anymore. You lost the right to ask me that when you forgot your wife and your vows to her.”

  “Where the fuck are you going?” Walker shouted again.

  “You didn’t care where I was, how I was, or what I was doing for two fucking months while you screwed everything with a pair of tits, Walker. You don’t get to waltz in here and pretend to care now.”

  “I’m not pretending,” he stated on a defeated note.

  “Well, it’s too late to start caring again,” I informed him.

  “It’s never too late,” he answered back.

  Chapter 4

  Saying goodbye to the people and to the place you’d known your whole life should be hard. It should be wrought with emotional hugs, kisses, and a huge fanfare seeing you off on your next journey. It should be all of those things, but for me it meant my brother coming to town with a moving truck, and Snake helping him load it up. Snake was the only person there to hug goodbye. The realtor had come by while we were busy to put the for sale sign up in the yard. The tears came then, because it was a sight I never thought I’d see or be ready for. The fact that I was ready now spoke to how broken I was inside.

  When I hadn’t responded to Walker telling me it’s never too late he had turned on his heel and walked out of our house for the last time. Two days later I watched from the window as he brought his own truck and loaded up the things that belonged to him that were in the shed. He never approached the house and I never bothered to leave it. I watched as the man I thought would be my everything climbed into that truck when he and Tank were done filling it and drove away. It was the last time I saw him. Now, I stood watching a woman hammer the for sale sign into my family home’s yard and I wished for the briefest of moments that things had been different and Walker had come to me before he broke things so irrevocably.

  “You ready, sis?” Keith asked me. I looked at my brother, who was wearing his MC kutte stating his name was Chief now, and I had a moment to think to myself that I needed to remember to call him that from here on out. I’d forgotten he earned the moniker because our Cherokee roots came out full blast in him when he was born. He had the high, pronounced cheekbones, darkly tanned skin, midnight hair, and deep brown eyes that our father had given him.

  Our father had been nearly full-blooded Cherokee with a white woman thrown in the mix a few generations back to muddy up the line, as he used to joke. Our mother was of Irish and Scottish descent, and I took mostly after her. I got my dad’s warm brown eyes, but that was all I’d inherited from him. The near on red, curly hair I had been graced with my entire life was straight from my mother’s gene pool, as were the freckles across my face, shoulders, and chest. I tanned, but in doing so the freckles ran amuck and reproduced all over my skin. I was not in any danger of being dubbed some crazy Native American name as my brother had been. Instead, I usually was forced to prove my heritage to anyone who hadn’t been around since forever to know who my parents were.

  “I’m ready,” I finally responded, as thoughts of my heritage drifted away. My hands were shaking as my brother took them in his and pulled me in close for a hug.

  “I know this is tough, but I think getting away from this town, and all the memories is going to help you heal finally, lil’ sis. I promise this isn’t the end of your life, it’s the damn beginning.”

  I had no choice, but to believe in the words my big brother spoke. It was all done now anyway. My house was up for sale, cleaned out, and everything I owned was stuffed in the back of a moving truck heading for a new town. Cedar Falls, West Virginia may have only been a bit more than a six-hour drive, but it was a world away. I’d only been there twice since my brother moved there after our family was killed. Both of those times I had gone with Walker, because there was a club thing to attend. This was definitely going to be a change. That being said, I knew I’d have to come back home to Sierra High at least one more time. I’d filed for divorce through an attorney just the day before. Walker should be served his paperwork today, according to Thom Lincoln, my attorney, and then we had no less than 30 days to wait for that to go through, unless Walker contested it for some reason. We had already split all of our marital assets. The house belonged to my brother and me in equal shares so Walker was not entitled to anything from its sale. He could try to fight for a portion of my part of the sale, but he’d be dumb to attempt it since the whole town knew he stepped out on me and Georgia didn’t look kindly on cheaters in court.

  Once I was settled in the passenger side of the moving truck my brother hopped in. He’d been making sure that my Subaru was attached properly since we were towing it behind us. My brother, in all his infinite wisdom, thought driving myself out of town might be a bit too emotional for me and he didn’t want me behind the wheel if and when I broke down – emotionally, because my car was in perfect working order. He most likely wasn’t wrong, but I was not about to tell him that.

  “It’s going to be okay, Sis.” His kind, soft words struck a chord in my heart, but I definitely disagreed with him. It was not okay now, and I didn’t foresee any of it being okay in the near future. It probably wouldn’t be okay in the distant future either.

  “Sure,” I muttered instead as I watched the town that held nearly every memory of my existence pass as we drove by like it was nothing more than forgotten scenery.

  “I still think you should have let me go hunt that fucker down. Just the fact that he left you alone on the anniversary gets my goat, especially in a storm.” My brother tried to swallow back his anger before he blew his top, and I wondered how he knew that, because I certainly hadn’t been the one to spill the beans.

  “How did you know that?”

  “The question that needs to be asked is why didn’t I know it sooner? Hell, I would have been down here two months ago to collect you had I known how bad shit had gotten.”

  “I didn’t even know how bad shit had gotten until that night, Keith, and when it happened I wasn’t really in a sharing kind of mood, you know?”

  “I know,” he said, softening his tone again. “Believe it or not, you have friends in the club. They informed me. They did it fuckin’ late, but they finally did it.”

  “Snake?” I asked already knowing the answer.

  “He was the first one to let me know. Asked that I wait to hear from you before I made my way down, because he thought, wrongly, that Walker would get his head out of his ass in time to save shit.” My brother hissed out. “I wish my sister would have told me though.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I thought…” I started, stopped, and then sighed out a breath that I couldn’t keep contained anymore. “I thought things had to get better, you know? Then they didn’t. Then they got worse, and I needed to figure out what I was going to do with my life without someone else telling me what to do. I went straight from mom and dad’s house to being with Walker. I’ve never done anything on my own without guidance, so I wanted to just make that decision without having to wonder if someone else had made a bad choice for me. This way, it’s all on me.”

  “It’s not all on you, and don’t you fuckin’ take it all either. Walker fucked your marriage up, Pop, not you. He’s the one that got you started on the kick to make a family. He should have sucked up his bullshit and finished what he started, any way that was possible once he got you excited about it. He didn’t do that. Then he dropped his stress, wounded pride, and whatever other bullshit burdens he carried in your lap without a care for your feelings. Then he really fucked up, and continued to do so once you took your space. From what I hear, none of the burden of the loss of your marriage falls on your shoulders, so don’t try to carry it.”

  “I know that,” I told him. “I also know that what I chose to do after was on my shoulders. Will be for some time. I’m having to start new, and scrape off the old, and the old still has a grip on my heart, Keith. Whether I want it to or not, it’s there. We spent ten
years together,” I reminded him.

  “Yeah, and from I hear the last few of those haven’t been roses. You made the right call, Lil’ Sis. If his answer to you kicking him out to give you time to sort your thoughts was to bang through club whores, then I guarantee that shit would not have ended with a reconciliation. I liked Walker for you back in the day, but something happened to break that man along the way, and you can’t heal what doesn’t want to fix itself.”

  “I learned that,” I told him as we crossed the state line into North Carolina. “Thanks for coming to help me, Keith.” I finally said as I glanced over at my brother who would end up being my strength for a while.

  “Should have forced that move on you when I made it. I’ve been worried with you so far away and our visits so few and far between. We lost everyone else, sucks that we haven’t been closer. I know that’s partly my fault since I left, but not a day goes by I don’t regret not bringing you with me. Living with their ghosts wasn’t a good idea. Living where I couldn’t make sure Walk was doing right by you, less of a good idea.”

  “Okay, big brother, well you get to see me every day now and I’m sure it’s going to get old, so be prepared.” I tried to lighten the mood with that. Keith took it for what it was and just smiled and then turned the radio up, and thank goodness for satellite radio, because there certainly weren’t any quality stations in these parts.

  Thankfully, my family’s house had been paid off when I inherited it so I simply put aside the money that I would have used as rent somewhere else so that I would have a rainy-day, house-fixing, whatever I needed it for savings to fall back on in hard times. That fund was what I’d planned to use for the IVF with Walker before everything fell completely apart. Instead, I was going to have to use it to help maintain my new place until I could get a steady job in Cedar Falls and get my feet under me again. I did some freelance work with graphics and building and maintaining websites for businesses, but the pay had just been the extra stuff I hid away in my savings account. It was more of a hobby, but I was hoping I could pick up a few more clients in addition to a steady paycheck somewhere once I got to Cedar Falls.